Beck and Call vs Beckon Call

I was well into my thirties before I learned that the correct expression is"beck and call", not "beckon call". In fact, the first time I encountered it, I assumed the writer (a business colleague) had made a sophomoric mistake.

In defense of my error, "beckon call" reminds me of other terms such as:

• borning cry
• siren song, swan song
• death rattle

Clearly the grammatically correct usage would be the gerund form, beckonING, as is the case with borning cry. But beckon is already a two-syllable word, and also a less-common word, which I would argue lends itself to a tendency to shorten, for metrical felicity.

My next example is "Siren song". This is not a perfect parallel example, since it does not involve a gerund, but illuminating in that it is an example of shortening for convenience (7.0M Google results for Siren, 1.4M for Siren's). Swan song is even more dramatic--"Swan's" yields very few matches.

My final example is "death rattle", which I see as being substantially parallel. "Dying rattle" barely registers in search numbers--though amusingly, the second hit is a brief poem that addresses the very point that death rattle is the more appealing phrase.

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So I think that is all a good argument that it is almost a sign of good linguistic judgment to assume "beckon call", if one has never seen the term in print. 

But the most compelling, in my mind, is the Occam's Razor take: "beck-and-call" sounds like a textbook example of the simplified, monosyllabic phonetic rendering that is the hallmark of a typical mondegreen(!)